Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 15

The Victoria Memorial was designed by Sir William Emerson, then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, after Lord Curzon proposed a memorial to Queen Victoria in 1901.

The Gateway of India at Apollo Bunder in Mumbai was raised to mark the landing of George V and Queen Mary in December 1911, the visit on which the Delhi Durbar was held and the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi was announced.

The Aga Khan Palace stands at Pune in Maharashtra. It was built in 1892 by Sultan Muhammed Shah Aga Khan III, partly as famine relief work for the surrounding villages, and it mixes Italianate arches with wide Indian verandahs over five acres of built space.

The National Council of Science Museums was set up in 1978 as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with its headquarters at Kolkata, and it runs the network of science centres and science cities across the country.

The Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji’s Saraswathi Mahal Library stands within the Thanjavur palace complex in Tamil Nadu.

Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, a mathematician who became the first librarian of the University of Madras, is called the father of library science in India.

The Rampur Raza Library is at Rampur in western Uttar Pradesh, housed in the Hamid Manzil inside the Rampur fort.

International Museum Day has been observed on 18 May since 1977 on the announcement of the International Council of Museums, a non-governmental body founded in 1946 with its headquarters at Paris, and each year it carries a theme.

It obliges a publisher to deliver one copy of every book published in India to the National Library at Kolkata and one copy each to the Connemara Public Library at Chennai, the Central Library at Mumbai and the Delhi Public Library; these four are the National Depository Libraries.

It was set up at Calcutta in 1891 to bring together the scattered records of the Government of India, shifted to New Delhi after the capital was transferred, and occupied its present building on Janpath, designed by Edwin Lutyens, in 1926.

The Imperial Library was created by the Imperial Library Act of 1902 and opened to readers in 1903 on Curzon’s initiative; he merged the collections of the Calcutta Public Library of 1836 with the Home Department secretariat libraries to form a single library of record.

The National Library of India stands in the Belvedere Estate at Alipore in Kolkata, in a building that was once the residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal.

The Salar Jung Museum stands on the south bank of the Musi river at Hyderabad and holds the collection built up mainly by Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, Salar Jung III, the Prime Minister of the Nizam of Hyderabad.

It was founded in 1814 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is the oldest museum in India as well as the largest multipurpose museum in the country, with sections for art, archaeology, anthropology, geology, zoology and economic botany.

The building is named after Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who founded the Council on 9 April 1950 and was its first President, and it houses the body that runs India's cultural centres abroad, the scholarship schemes for foreign students and the chairs of Indian studies in foreign universities.

The Centre for Cultural Resources and Training was set up in New Delhi in 1979 to bring culture into school education, and it trains teachers and teacher educators, prepares teaching material on the arts, and gives scholarships to young children with talent in the arts.

The Zonal Cultural Centres were created from 1985 onwards to work with folk and tribal arts across cultural rather than political boundaries, and there are seven of them: the North Zone Centre at Patiala, the North Central Zone Centre at Prayagraj, the West Zone Centre at Udaipur, the South Zone…

The Indian Museum at Kolkata was founded in 1814, grew out of the collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is both the oldest and the largest museum in the country, with sections on art, archaeology, anthropology, geology, zoology and botany.

The Archaeological Survey of India was created in 1861 and Cunningham, an army engineer turned archaeologist who had surveyed Buddhist sites following the accounts of Chinese travellers, became its first Director-General; he is often called the father of Indian archaeology.

The Lalit Kala Akademi was founded on 5 August 1954 as the national academy of art, in the same year as the Sahitya Akademi, which was inaugurated on 12 March 1954.